A month by month marketing plan for a lawn and landscape company

By Steve Meitler · 2026-08-19 · 6 min read

When to spend, when to stop, how to work the spring rush without drowning, door hangers and yard signs for route density, and what to sell in winter.

Almost every marketing mistake in this trade is a timing mistake. Owners advertise in April, when the phone is already ringing and clicks cost double, then go dark in December when their customer list is sitting at home with nothing to do. The season is fixed. The plan should be built around it, not against it.

What follows assumes a northern or transitional climate. If you are in Florida, Texas or southern California, shift the maintenance push earlier and replace the snow section with the winter install season, which is your best selling window of the year.

January and February: the cheapest leads you will buy

This is when you sell the season, and almost nobody is bidding against you. Clicks on maintenance terms run roughly half what they cost in April.

• Run maintenance search ads at a real budget, $20 to $40 a day, with a "book your season before March 1" angle.
• Email and text your entire past customer list with the renewal and a locked rate. This alone should fill 60% to 80% of your route.
• Raise prices now, in writing, for a March 1 start. See the pricing guide.
• Fix the website and the Google profile while you have time. In April you will not.
• Sell spring cleanups on prepay. Cash in February is worth more than cash in May.

March and April: the rush, and route density

The phone rings on its own. Your job is not to generate more leads, it is to answer them and to make the route tight. A stop that is two miles from the next one destroys the margin that a stop next door creates.

Door hangers. Print 5,000 at about $0.06 each. Every time a crew finishes a first cut or a cleanup, they drop hangers on the 20 nearest houses on the same street before they load up. It costs roughly $1.20 per street and it is the cheapest route-density tool that exists. Response is usually 0.5% to 2%, which sounds small until you notice those customers are all on a street you already drive to.

Yard signs. $4 to $7 each. Leave one at every install and cleanup for a week, ask permission at the walkthrough, and put a short URL and phone on it in text large enough to read from a car. Signs work here because the buying signal is visible: the neighbor is looking at a yard that just got better.

Answer the phone. Answer rate is the number that collapses in April. Have text-back running before March 1 and someone on replies during the day. The follow-up guide has the setup, and the calculator shows what the gap costs.

Drop maintenance ad budget by half once the route is full, and move it to install terms.

May, June and July: sell the projects

The route is running itself. This is install season, and it is where the margin is.

• Shift Google Ads budget to patios, walls, sod, drainage and irrigation.
• Run before and after creative on Meta at $15 to $30 a day, retargeting anyone who visited the hardscape page. The Meta ads guide covers the formats.
• Sell up the existing route: mulch refresh, shrub trimming, bed rebuilds. Four texts to your maintenance list in June will book more work than a month of ads.
• Shoot photos relentlessly. Every before and after you take now is next February's advertising.

Watch for the July slump. Growth slows, cuts stretch to biweekly in dry regions, and revenue dips. That is the month to book September aeration in advance.

August and September: aeration, overseeding, and the fall install push

• Aeration and overseeding is the highest-margin add-on in maintenance and it sells almost entirely to existing customers. Send the offer in late August with a price, and book by street to keep the route tight.
• Fall is the best planting window in most of the country, which makes September and October a strong second install season. Say so in the ad copy, most homeowners do not know it.
• In cold states, start preselling snow removal in September. Not November.

October and November: the winter offset

In cold states this is where companies either build a second season or spend four months burning cash.

Snow removal. Sell seasonal contracts, not per-push, wherever the customer will take it. A seasonal contract is predictable revenue that arrives whether it snows or not, and it keeps crews employed, which is what actually decides whether you can rehire in March. Sell to your maintenance list first, then to commercial lots, which pay better and are booked earlier, often by October 1.

Holiday lighting. Install and takedown, priced at roughly three times material cost, sold in October to the same list. High margin, and it puts your truck in front of the house during the one month everyone's neighbors are outside looking at the house.

Leaf cleanup. Sell it as a package with the last cut, not as a separate call, and price it by lot size so the office can quote it without you.

If you are in a warm state, replace this section with the fall and winter install season and keep advertising through it. Your competitors will not.

December: do not go dark

The mistake that costs the most and feels the safest. Companies cut all marketing on December 1 and restart in March, a month behind the ones that never stopped.

• Keep Google Ads running at $10 a day. It preserves account history and costs less than restarting cold.
• Send one December message to the customer list: thank you, next year's schedule, renewal rate.
• Ask for reviews from the whole season's customers. Winter is when people have time to write them, and across 91,717 listings the median company sits at only 7 reviews with 55.6% under 10, so a January push moves you noticeably. The reviews guide has the wording.
• Rebuild the site, fix the photos, write the service pages. These are winter jobs.

The one-page calendar

• January: renewals, price increase letters, maintenance ads on, website work.
• February: prepay cleanups, presell the season, profile photos updated.
• March: answer the phone, door hangers behind every crew, text-back live.
• April: route density, yard signs, halve maintenance ad spend once full.
• May to July: install ads, before and after creative, upsell the route.
• August: aeration offers to the list, book September by street.
• September: fall planting push, start snow presell in cold states.
• October: snow contracts, holiday lighting, cleanup packages.
• November: finish cleanups, close snow sales, collect reviews.
• December: low-budget ads, customer list message, review push, rebuild the site.

Frequently asked

What if I have no winter offering at all? Then December through February is your entire marketing season for next year. Spend it on renewals, reviews, the website and preselling. A landscaper who books 70% of the route by March 1 has a completely different year than one who starts calling in April.

Should I keep the phone number answered in the off season? Yes. Snow calls, tree damage, and next-season planners all call in winter, and a company that answers in January is remembered in March.

Do door hangers still beat digital? For route density on a street you already service, yes, at a fraction of the cost. For reaching a town you do not work yet, no. Run both, for different jobs.

Seasonal campaign planning is part of the free 14-day trial, and the trial can start in any month. Text or call (385) 832-6175.